Per Larry Linson:
Either way, I'd advise anybody who is thinking of buying Speed
Ferret to give "Find and Replace" a test drive.
I've tried Ferret, been using Find/Replace for at least 10 years
and, IMHO, there is no comparison in speed/convenience: Rick's
tool wins hands-down.
I would say just the opposite. I purchased Rick's product recently
because Speed Ferret is not keeping up with current versions of
Access (I have used the A97 version since 1999), and to me, there's
no comparison whatsoever. Speed Ferret is much more powerful and
much more granular in its ability to control what is found and what
is replaced.
I actually use Rick's utility less than I use a utility called MDB
Search that was created by "Ucora and Jamie Horenstein." It has its
rough edges, but works quite well for most of the operations I use
one of these tools for. Unfortunately, it's no longer available so
far as any of my Googling can determine.
Another option that I recently used in a case where I'd have used
Speed Ferret if I'd had a version that worked with A2003 is to
temporarily turn on Name AutoCorrect. I found this extremely
helpful, but the one limitation of it is that you have to do the
changes manually through the UI -- code changes don't get processed
by the Name AutoCorrect engine. But it did save me a lot of time in
an app where I had to remove Leszinsky-Reddick prefixes from field
names. To help with that, I created this little utility (very rough
-- I did just enough UI on it so I could use it myself):
http://dfenton.com/DFA/download/Access/DataRename.zip
It does three things:
1. removes lookup fields.
2. renames fields from a model to a target (useful for copying
changes from your test database to the production copy without
needing to write reams of complicated DDL that creates new fields,
appends the data then deletes the original field).
3. renames tables.
4. copies relationships.
This allowed me to make changes to my test database on my PC, then
take a copy of that and propagate all the changes to the production
database in about an hour. It was a pretty extensive set of changes
and writing code to do it in a completely automated fashion would
have taken days. The code behind that utility didn't take much time
at all. I'm sure there are things wrong with it, and bugs and all,
but it saved me a lot of time with something I have to do in
practically every existing project I take over (i.e., ones that I
wasn't responsible for designing/implementing). None of the
search/replace tools could do what I needed reliably enough that I
could get by without creating this little utility.
